Leo Triplet – Three Galaxies at the Limit of Backyard Astrophotography

After getting a pretty good image of the Orion Nebula from my backyard, I wanted to try some tougher targets. With about half the moon in view and it sitting near Orion, I had to move away from the Milky Way to find a good deep space object to image.

I tried the Christmas Tree Cluster first. The result is below. Lesson learned: the sky in my backyard is too bright to image something that dark. Even with lots of data crunching & image stretching, there’s just not much nebula visible.